This year’s Hajj, the Muslim religion’s most important event of the year, saw up to 3m devout, roughly 2m of whom come from abroad, worshipping in Saudi Arabia. The Arab world’s largest economy faced a huge logistical task to cater and care for this mass of humanity.
Happily, the economic benefits those pilgrims brought with them were just as a big. According to some estimates, the Saudi economy enjoyed a injection of more than $30bn from the five-day holiday which ended on Sunday.
The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and one that every Muslim is supposed to perform once in their lifetime if both physically and financially able. That edict translates into millions of Muslims every year descending upon Mecca, swelling its population of about 1.5m to triple its normal size.
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